Earth, December 8th
It was a dreary overcast day, the sort where you want to stay inside while the rain softly plops down onto the roof and slides down your porch. No one would be inside that morning, as there was work to be done, to put the dead at peace.
The funeral was held in an open field with a small, old, and gray church, near a newly made cemetery. Many of the bodies had already been buried in the cemetery made for this sole tragedy of the October Massacre, but Mayor Anderson decided it would be psychologically healthy for the entire town if they held one.
Mayor Anderson did everything that Maximillian should have done. She created funding to create a monument for those that died, helped get funding to clean up the campus, and finally, she financed the funerals of those that could not bury their families.
Maximilian did not want to do any of this. His lawyer told him that any of these actions would be an admission of guilt, and he would lose one of his many lawsuits.
It was a wearisome funeral and a bizarre one at that.
Odd-looking people had arrived. They were of various races, and many of them seemed to have no connection to each other, yet they all stood together in one crowd. They did not speak, because they had no need to use words with each other. They were a hive mind, and even those without abilities could sense that something was different.
The most visited grave that night was that of Santos Dominus, literally translated as master of saints. No one was really sure if that was his name, and no one had believed his son, George, that it was. Reluctantly it was put on his tombstone, and all of his children were satisfied.
One by one, all the children that he had created, either by blood or through birth came to visit. Many of them never said a word, and those that did never spoke to anyone else outside of their group.
The size of the group grew and shrunk throughout the day. Those that ran the procession knew something was off about them, and they did not even check to see if they were allowed at the funeral. They could feel the same kind of energy that they gave off the second that they arrived, and let them in.
They all had the cold unfeeling gaze of reptiles.
Fenton visited Santos’s grave multiple times, curious about those that claimed to be his children. At first many of them were hostile, but once Fenton said they were friends, and talked about their time together, they all opened up to him. Fenton used his ability to see if they were lying about the fantastical tales they told him.
Not a single one was, and Fenton finally accepted that Santos had been truthful all along, that he really was a vampire.
Fenton was sure that maybe he wasn’t dead, that maybe he died because he was tired of living. Santos always complained about how everything bored him, and living was a chore.
People who were still living, regular people, came to visit Santos’s grave. Many women of various ages whom Fenton knew were human claimed that he was the biological father of their children. It was not a lie, as they all looked like him.
What Fenton found peculiar, was that some of the women were eighty-seven, with great-grandchildren, and the youngest was twenty-four, with a toddler. Kalei was one of his numerous granddaughters, and she was one of the few that never left the entire day. She was depressed at first, but when she met her family that visited that day, she no longer felt lonely.
They all embraced her, in their circle, in their minds, and she would never feel lonely again.
Fenton was a tourist inside a strange world. As he was considering that he should probably no longer speak to any of Santos’s eccentric family members, a pregnant woman with two men arrived.
The young men looked to be no older than twenty-eight, and immediately Fenton knew that they were one of them.
Nymphadora and her sons, the most trusted of her husband’s children, came to his funeral. He was sleeping, and they mourned him, and his death. Nymphadora did not shed a tear.
Instead, she was quite bothered by the entire ordeal. She came to quell the fears of her children, telling them that their father was still alive, merely sleeping.
"A little nap in the dirt," was what she told them. "Do not worry. He will be back."
None of Santos's children believed her, except for the older ones. They had seen the things he could do and feared him. They did not believe he died, not because of his immortality, but because of his sheer strength.
His eldest children truly believed that death itself feared him.
"Who are you," Fenton asked Nymphadora.
"Who are you, " she asked.
"I’m his friend!"
She smiled, knowing that she was higher on the totem pole than him.
"I am Nymphadora," she said. "His first wife."
Fenton wondered how old she was, but was afraid to ask. He was naive enough to ask earlier, and some of the years made no sense to him.
He knew that she was also lying about being his first wife, and found it odd that she introduced herself as such.
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"Don’t worry," she said. "We’re not grave robbers. Georgie told us that my husband was dead and we knew that was wrong. He can’t die."
"Everyone can die," Fenton insisted. "I know it must be hard on you, especially since you’re his second wife and-"
" Shut up. I am his primary lover and his second creation. I know what I speak of. He is not dead. "
Fenton said nothing, as the two men glared at him silently. They were both twins and were the spitting image of Santos. Fenton was uncomfortable staring at the two of them as if his friend were still alive and not in the ground. He also noticed something about their auras that made him grimace.
They seemed close. Too close.
"I will never understand why he likes to play pretend for so long," Nymphadora said.
"Play pretend," Fenton asked.
"Yes, little meatsuit! He likes to play human, and try on different lives. When he’s done he comes back to me. "
Fenton did not react to the insult, as many of Santos’ family members had called him that throughout the day. It was a very factual and disgusting insult. The way they all said it, like a slur, meatsuit, was what really made him uncomfortable.
It made him think they wanted to wear his body like a suit.
Nymphadora rubbed her rotund belly and complained.
"I’m hungry," she groaned. "Since we know he’s here we can get lunch and come back later. Remind me to kill Maximillian as well."
Her sons nodded and Fenton hoped that she would kill Maximillian Slater, performing a civic duty that everyone else had only dreamed about. As they left, Fenton wondered if Santos pretended to be his friend, and finally went home, after arguing with his teammates and having Ace avoid him, yet again.
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When the funeral had ended Nymphadora and her sons returned to Santos's grave. Her sons were dressed quite casually, and they hated it. Nymphadora told them, for the sake of blending in, they must dress like meatsuits.
Her sons, Dante and Kato Dominus brought shovels.
It would not be difficult to dig up their father’s grave, as he was newly buried, and the graveyard itself was newly built. The rain made the ground wet and soft as they approached. The sounds of their shoes squished softly against the mud and thunder roared over their heads.
Dante began to unearth his father’s grave as Kato held a large umbrella to shield his pregnant mother. She watched intensely as her eldest dug until he hit the coffin. The rain was quite heavy by the time he had pulled it out, and the coffin was quite ornate and beautiful.
"What a waste of money," Nymphadora scoffed. "The dead don't notice what wooden box they're in."
Her sons nodded in agreement and smiled, their razor incisors making them look no longer handsome but horrific.
Dante opened the coffin for his mother and inside was a corpse.
It was not her husband.
The man in question looked like her husband, but he was not. She knew it could not be him because the corpse did not smell like him. It could not be his body either, because it was already decomposing.
"Mother," whispered Kato. "Someone has taken him."
"The meatsuits took him," Dante affirmed. "They are nothing but sentient cows trying to stave off their own deaths."
"Let us give Maximillian the benefit of the doubt," Nymphadora said.
Dante and Kato were surprised. Their mother had become jaded after several lifetimes of seeing the horrors of humanity. To give someone the benefit of the doubt, she must think of him highly.
"Let’s pay him a visit," she said.
She rubbed her pregnant belly and slowly made her way back to their car, where the driver waited for them patiently. He was another of her husband’s children, and he was disappointed to hear what had happened.
He knew that his father's body was not in the grave before they arrived in the car. In fact, all of Santos's family knew the moment Dante saw the stranger's corpse. They were connected, a hive mind, feeling an intimacy that no other normal human would ever come close to comprehending.
When one of them died it was not a sad event. It was mind-shattering and brutal, a deep pain that scarred their minds, tenfold, as they all felt the same pain, and it weighed on top of each other, coalescing into a horrible, boundless, and unending grief.
They knew simultaneously that when they all visited his grave earlier that it was not his body. Their sadness quickly turned into anger. As the driver took Nymphadora where she wanted to go, without having to ask because he knew, like all the others, they communicated with each other, deliberating on what to do.
Nymphadora was Santos’ second first wife, and his second child, so she was in charge, and she had the final say. Her eyes flickered rapidly as the entire family discussed the betrayal of Maximillian Slater.
They assumed the possibility that Maximillian took the body to a secret location, to protect Santos. Santos had protected the Slaters for years, and in turn, they had protected his family. But one of them mentioned,
"If he brought the body to a secret location, why didn’t he tell Mother?"
The anger then came to a roaring climax when Momo suggested that they wanted to "Keep the body for themselves, as some sort of exhibit in their home". Many suggested killing Maximillian on-site, while others said they should torture him slowly.
By the time Nymphadora had arrived at the New Springfield satellite office, she was completely enraged and no longer trusted Maximillian. She and her sons entered the glass spire, which was open 24/7 to deal with the recent fallout of the October Massacre, and Nymphadora knew that Maximillian would be inside.
She walked to the front desk and stared down at the receptionist, wondering why he was so rude. He had not come to greet her outside, in the rain before she entered the building. He was a skinny and pale man.
"Hello mother," he smiled. "I’ll take you to him."
Nymphadora and her three sons went to Maximillian's suite inside Slater Tower and opened the door. It wasn't locked, in fact, it was left slightly ajar. They walked inside to see him plowing Mary Sue on the kitchen counter, her Amazonian body sweating and smacking against the marble countertops.